Negative Employee Attitudes: An Ever-Present Challenge

Article submission for Blogger Derby 2010: The most important lesson I learned during 2010?

Managers have challenging jobs even with high performing employees. When they have questions about how to motivate, give feedback, and/or develop employees, they can always find processes and tools that help.

The big problem is employees with negative attitudes. All too often, managers feel like they don’t know what to do to turn things around.

I didn’t realize just how pervasive this was until I looked back at what crossed my path in 2010.

During the year, I wrote two posts specific to employee attitude problems:

Wordpress counted over 1,800 views for these two posts in one year. Every day I see the searches for “employee attitudes,” “bad attitude,” “bad employee behavior,” and lots of other combinations, that have led to these posts. These are people looking for help to deal with this problem.

I see it too with my clients. My most compelling case in 2010 was a senior leader, (I’ll call her, Beverly), who’d inherited a department of employees who’d simply been doing their own thing for over a year. Her predecessor had provided neither direction nor boundaries.

The result was a group of employees who’d staked out their own turfs; some ran roughshod over others; and others simply resisted everything. Beverly tried to win her employees over while knocking herself out to meet the requirements of internal customers and senior leadership. Nothing she tried worked as intended.

There were, predictably, a couple of ring leaders who fully intended to sabotage Beverly. It nearly worked until we put together integrated change management initiatives that turned things around. What Beverly saw was that the best way to change employee attitudes is to establish accountabilities and hold people to them.

Through painstaking efforts, negative attitudes are turning into engagement with Beverly and colleagues. But there’s still plenty of work to do.

Confirming enlarges our learning.

I’d suspected that dealing with negative employee attitudes was an ever- present condition in the workplace, but I had lost sight of how difficult it is for managers to deal with it.

It’s not that they don’t want to: It’s that they don’t feel confident that they know how. It’s all about figuring out how to:

Find words that describe the attitude

Capture specific moments (visual/auditory snapshots) when the attitude is evident

Describe the manifestations of the attitude and its impact

Confront them in a way that can turn them around

Intervene when they are affecting others

Incorporate ways to change them through performance goals

Coach for improvement

Give feedback about them

Terminate employment when they don’t change

Negative employee attitudes run the gamut. They are often brought to work, get triggered by situations, and then infect others. When managers can successfully direct and support an employee’s efforts to turn a negative attitude into a positive one, their stock goes way up with everyone around them.

"Athena, thanks for figuring out how to comment here! You are so right, ""attitude is everything."" The challenge is figuring out how to manage it so that it helps us move forward rather than drag us down (and others with us!). Yours is a terrific insight...I'm grateful for your kudos. ~Dawn "

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DawnLennon

September 19, 2017 04:39 PM

"Sara, many thanks for your note and comment. Believe me, I heaved a sigh of relief when the fixes I helped Beverly put into practice made a positive difference. These things are never a lock even when you've been through them before.

Thaks as always for your help! ~Daen "

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Sara Moore

September 19, 2017 04:39 PM

"Dawn,

Thanks for submitting this post and your employee growth article into the Blogger Derby! Both are very encouraging posts. I'm glad Beverly was able to turn things around. Managing a team like that sounds like quite a challenge!

Voting on blogger derby submissions will be begin next month, good luck!